The Rise & Fall of ECW (4 page)
Read The Rise & Fall of ECW Online
Authors: Tazz Paul Heyman Thom Loverro,Tommy Dreamer
While Heyman was considering his future, Jim Crockett was considering starting a third wrestling company to compete against Turner and McMahon, and do something different, which appealed to Heyman. And Eddie Gilbert called again and told Heyman he needed him to help with an independent Pennsylvania operation, and Heyman could pretty much do his thing there as well. So Heyman began working with both operations.
Eddie Gilbert had moved on to Philadelphia to work with a local wrestling operation there run by a jewelry store operator and wrestling fan named Tod Gordon. Gilbert had started running shows at a variety of locations—Philadelphia’s Original Sports Bar, the Chestnut Cabaret, the Tabor Rams Youth Association, and Cabrini College in suburban Philadelphia, Gordon’s promotion—created from what was left of the Tri-State Wrestling Alliance—managed to get some television time on SportsChannel in Philadelphia, starting in March 1993. Gordon used local independent wrestlers who were willing to work for $25 or $50 a show, and then highlight it with an older “name” wrestler, like Don Muraco or “Superfly” Jimmy Snuka—the typical formula that kept independent promoters in business. They called the promotion Eastern Championship Wrestling, and aligned themselves with the NWA coalition of small-town promoters that still existed, although the NWA was a shell of its former self. Snuka, who was once a headliner for Vince McMahon and was known for his high-flying style, was their first heavyweight champion, crowned on April 25, 1992. Two months later, the Super Destroyers were named the Eastern Championship Wrestling World Tag Team Champions, and three months later they created an Eastern Championship Wrestling World Television Champion, Johnny Hotbody.
In May 1993, the promotion moved to what would eventually become its permanent home, a warehouse-style structure in an industrial section of South Philadelphia, just off Interstate 95, at the intersection of Swanson and Ritner streets, called Viking Hall. It was owned by the South Philadelphia Viking Club, the neighborhood mummers group that marched in the Philadelphia New Year’s Day parade known as the Mummers Day Parade. They stored their mummers floats in the building, as well as holding bingo events there. Viking Hall would soon become a wrestling version of the Boston Garden, or the San Francisco Cow Palace—an old, rundown, legendary location that held a special place in the hearts of fans.
Gilbert managed to attract a couple of veterans to Eastern Championship Wrestling—Shane Douglas, who was well-known on the independent circuit but had not been able to make it big in the majors, and Terry Funk, a member of one of wrestling’s royal families and one of those “living legend” type of wrestlers that fans everywhere recognized. Gilbert and Funk helped kick off the new home of ECW by engaging in a Texas Chainsaw Massacre match. But Gilbert was dealing with personal problems (he would die two years later of a heart attack) and would have a falling out with Gordon in August 1993. When Gilbert left Eastern Championship Wrestling, the company was without a booker, so Gordon turned to Heyman for help. Heyman was already committed to the new promotion being started by Crockett, but he made a deal to work with both. Heyman booked shows for Eastern Championship Wrestling, with the idea of developing stars and then moving them up to Crockett’s national promotion.
Gilbert vs. Funk.
Heyman thought of the ECW job as a temporary arrangement. “I told Tod I was on borrowed time, and this was what I was going to do,” Heyman said. “I am going to introduce all these wild new characters with all these local guys. I want you to know that I am going to piss off your veterans, because they are all going to lose to the young guys. I plan, within a month, to have one or two veterans left. One was Shane Douglas, who was a veteran, but was only 29 or 30 years old and had been in all the territories. He had pretty much burned his bridges wherever he went. He had just come out of WCW, and started there under Eddie. I give him the name ‘The Franchise,’ because in a promotion filled with neither good guys nor bad guys, he will be the one real heel. I will make people hate him. He will be our standard bearer. He will end up being our true heel champion that people will pay to see get beat.”
The other anchor of the promotion was obvious—Funk. “Terry Funk understands this business,” Heyman explains, “and, as an old-timer, Terry Funk will sit there and say, ‘Let me make that kid. Let me build up a feud with this kid and then he will beat me. And then I will go and fight that kid, and I will smack him around, and he will beat me.’ Terry Funk will go through that whole locker room and end up making everybody.”
He would do just that, because, for one thing, Terry Funk was made for eternity in the wrestling business. He had nothing left to prove. And he would do that because he had a love for the business and wanted to see a new generation move the industry forward. It was more than a business for Funk. It was his family’s legacy.
Dory Funk, Sr., was one of the all-time greats. His two sons, Dory Jr., and Terry, followed their father, who became a promoter in the Amarillo area, into wrestling after both of them played football at West Texas State. Terry Funk made his pro wrestling debut on December 9, 1965, against Sputnik Monroe in Amarillo. He would eventually become world champion by defeating Gene Kiniski. Terry and Dory, Jr., became star attractions not just throughout the South, but in Japan as well for a number of years in the early 1970s.
Terry Funk came back to the States and defeated Jack Brisco to win the National Wrestling Alliance World Heavyweight Championship in 1975 in Miami, but would continue to be a presence both in the South and in Japan. In 1983, Terry announced his retirement from wrestling and went on a tour of Japan. His last match was to have taken place in Tokyo, when he and his brother Dory were matched up against Stan Hansen and Terry Gordy. Terry Funk even went as far as giving an emotional farewell speech, but for him to leave wrestling was akin to stopping breathing. Terry Funk returned to wrestle for All Japan promotions in 1984, and also appeared in World Wrestling Federation matches in the mid-1980s. He also began working in movies and television shows, a favorite of Sylvester Stallone, who cast Terry Funk in his wrestling movie
Paradise Alley
and his film about arm wrestling,
Over the Top.
He continued to wrestle, promote, act, and serve as a commentator throughout the business. He faced Ric Flair in 1989 for the NWA World Heavyweight Championship, kicking off a lengthy feud between the two legends. One year later, Terry Funk, wrestling in the United States Wrestling Association, beat Jerry Lawler to win their version of the heavyweight championship, twenty-five years after he broke into the business.
Though he was one of the legends of the business and an established star, Terry Funk continued to work with independent promotions and began making appearances in 1993 in Eastern Championship Wrestling. He would be the foundation that Paul Heyman would use to build a promotion—a legend from the past to create a vision for the future.
Tod Gordon with Shane Douglas.
Laying the Foundation
P
aul Heyman always had a lot of the mad scientist in him—the type that was willing to experiment with different ingredients in the hope of creating something new and exciting. He had ideas about how to do this, but never had the sort of laboratory that Tod Gordon was offering him in Philadelphia. There weren’t a lot of options for Gordon after his fallout with Eddie Gilbert, a talented but troubled booker. So when he turned to Heyman to salvage this small wrestling promotion, he had to live with the idea that it was not going to be business as usual.
The formula Gordon had used to date in Eastern Championship Wrestling—nondescript local talent with a washed-up name veteran to lure people in—was history. Heyman had a plan for the promotion to create its own stars. And he started right off the bat with the first match of the first night he was in charge, creating a new tag team. It turned out he hit a home run with his first experiment—The Public Enemy, which would turn out to be one of the most popular tag teams the business has ever seen. And it started with two small-time independent wrestlers who had bounced around the business—the least likely candidates to be wrestling superstars.
Ted Petty was a 6-foot-2, 250-pound, 39-year-old veteran of the Northeast independent circuit who had flirted with the big time, with tryouts in WCW and a handful of matches for Vince McMahon. But Petty was never able to make the leap, so he wrestled for small promotions in small towns and supplemented his income by renting out a ring that he owned. Like most wrestlers, Petty—born in Woodbridge, New Jersey, and a graduate of Rutgers University—had been through a variety of personas and gimmicks over his fifteen-year career, at one time wearing a mask and calling himself The Leopard Mask and later The Cheetah Kid.
Petty, who died of a heart attack in 2002, often traveled with his own opponent: Mike Durham, a 6-foot-3, 260-pound kid out of Compton, California. He used the name Johnny Rotten, and while he was not a particularly good wrestler, he put on a good show as a punk rocker. Heyman had seen the two periodically on TV shows, and also once in a match in Singapore, and thought the two would make a perfect fit for an idea he had flying back from Singapore in the summer of 1993. He had been reading a
Newsweek
article about the cultural changes taking place in America, and about the problems for young men in places like South Central in Los Angeles and Washington Heights in New York. “I read a line in that story that said today we live in an environment that for the first time ever, there are teenagers who are more afraid of living than dying,” Heyman recalls. “That line blew me away. I thought we should get these two white guys to do a hip-hop routine where they come out dressed as hoodies, with the baseball uniforms and the hot look in 1993. Their catch phase would be ‘Can’t scare us because we’re the first generation of American children more afraid of living than dying.’ Even though one guy was 39 years old, he didn’t look it. I called them not Public Enemy, which was the name of the rap group, but ‘The Public Enemy,’ which was the name of the James Cagney movie where he shoves the grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s face.”
Heyman saw something in both of these unknowns beyond what they did in the ring, and what he did with Ted Petty and Mike Durham was the blueprint for what he would eventually do with ECW. He made them stars in interviews. “These were two of the funniest guys you would ever want to meet,” Heyman said. “But Teddy never showed you that side because, number one, he was never on television enough, and number two, he wore a mask. So I took the mask off him and gave him the name Flyboy Rocco Rock, like Snoop Doggy Dog, and Durham, instead of Johnny Rotten, I called him Johnny Grunge. They became Flyboy Rocco Rock & Johnny Grunge, The Public Enemy. They would do interviews that were just over-the-top ridiculous. They were funny as hell, and then they would go out to the ring and brawl their asses off. They would go over the rails, which at the time was a huge taboo. They used weapons, they used frying pans, baseball bats. This was the act that caught everyone’s attention because it was so over the top. In the ring, it was like a riot. And the reason we did it was, they really couldn’t wrestle. Teddy could wrestle a little bit. He could put together a nice ten-minute simple match—armbar, headlock, takedown, whip into the ropes, and he could do some nice flying moves. But he wasn’t going to put on a five-star match. It wasn’t going to happen. Johnny couldn’t wrestle. He could just fight.” The Public Enemy was born, and their main gimmick was tables, using them to hit people with and throw people through.
“The theory was that you accentuate the positives and hide the negatives, and I said to Tod, ‘We are going to open the show with The Public Enemy.’”
Heyman continued to go through his memory bank and Rolodex to build his new stable of stars. He remembered another independent wrestler who had impressed him when they had crossed paths; he was going by the name of Tazmaniac.
Peter Senerca, who would later be known as Tazz to ECW fans, was a Brooklyn-born tough guy, a compact powerhouse at 5-foot-9 and 250 pounds who had worked as a bouncer and security guard. He grew up playing football and competing in judo, reaching a second-degree black belt. He was going to C.W. Post College on Long Island when, anxious to make some money, he quit because he saw wrestling as an easy way to cash in on his physical skills. “I was going to college as a physical education major,” Tazz explains. “My dream was to be a high school phys ed teacher and coach football. Then, as I was going to school, I realized gym teachers didn’t make a lot of money and I started thinking I could do wrestling. One thing led to another, and I started doing it.”
So in 1990, Tazz signed up for a wrestling school run by veteran wrestler Johnny Rodz, who would train many of the wrestlers who would become ECW stars. They started at an old boxing gym in Brooklyn, then moved over to Gleason’s, the world famous boxing gym. The same day that Tazz started, he met another first-day student—a very big man, at 6-foot-3, 290 pounds, named Alex Rizzo. He was going by the name Alexander the Great. ECW fans would get to know him as Big Dick Dudley, one of the many members of the Dudley family. (Big Dick Dudley passed away in 2002 due to kidney failure.)
“I thought I was going to conquer the world of wrestling,” Tazz said. “I was immature, and thought I could just walk into the business and kick the shit out of everyone and just make it. It didn’t work out that way, it took a lot longer than I thought.”
Tazz started wrestling in shows in Puerto Rico, where Rodz had some connections. And, like most wrestlers who are trying to break into the business, Tazz wrestled on the independent circuit in the northeastern United States. Life in the indies can be pretty chaotic, as Tazz learned in his experience with one of the legendary old-school wrestling families, the Savoldis.
“I was getting booked for this company called IWCCW in 1990,” remembers Tazz, who was working on building up his character at the time, The Tazmaniac. “The owner was a guy named Mario Savoldi, and it was based in Parsipanny, New Jersey. They called me on the phone and asked me to go to Westchester, where they were doing TV tapings. I didn’t want to just go and get beat by some old guy and hurt my future in the business. I said, ‘Yes, I will go there, no problem.’ But they had a reputation for guys coming in there to do jobs [lose], so I said I would come in, but I would wear a mask, because I didn’t want to just do a job. They said, ‘No, you don’t have to wear a mask. We don’t want you to do a job. We want to promote and push you.’” (A push is when a booker helps a wrestler become more popular with fans, usually through winning matches.)
“I brought the mask with me anyway, so I could wrestle then under an anonymous name. I get up there, and there are a shitload of guys in the locker room. I look at the list, and they were doing three hours of TV, three weeks of shows, one hour, one hour, one hour. I was scheduled to wrestle against guys that I knew I was not supposed to win against.
“So Tazz confronted one of the Savoldis there, Tom, and said, ‘What is the deal, you got me doing a job here? I got no problem, I will wear a mask, but I can’t wrestle under the name Tazmaniac. That is not going to happen. I am trying to get this gimmick over.’ They said, ‘No, no, no, sorry, there was a miscommunication. You have to come do the job like that.’ They were trying to fuck with me.”
Tazz refused to go out there without the mask. “They got pissed off and started yelling, ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ and all that stuff. At the time I was a real hothead. I had a chip on my shoulder, and I didn’t give a shit about anybody. I said, ‘Go fuck yourself.’ All the Savoldis were there, and I am ready to throw hands. I said, ‘Fine, I’m leaving.’ They said, ‘Go ahead and leave, you’ll never work in the state of New York again. We’re hooked up with the athletic commission and all that.’ I told them I would do it under one condition, and they lied to me. So I leave.”
A few months later, Tazz got a message that Paul Heyman wanted to talk to him. Tazz thought it was some of his friends playing a joke. But after several missed phone calls back and forth, sure enough, Tazz got Heyman on the phone, and Heyman said he had been looking to book Tazz for quite some time, and he wanted to get him in on a promotion he was booking for in New Jersey—for that same legendary wrestling family, the Savoldis. Tazz said it was very unlikely that the Savoldis would want him anywhere near their promotion, and he explained why. But Heyman told him it wouldn’t be a problem.
Tazz remembers Heyman telling him, “ ‘I know what happened. I know they don’t like you. I’m in with these people. Don’t worry about it. You’re taken care of. If you have to walk, I’m walking with you.’ I am thinking, this guy doesn’t even know me, what the hell is he talking about? He is going to walk if I walk? Whatever. I needed the money, $100 or $150. So I ask him, ‘You’re going to push me, right?’ He said, ‘I promise, I give you my word. If they try any bullshit, I am out of there.’”
The show Heyman wanted Tazz for was in Middletown, New York. He rode up to the show with two wrestlers, one of them Ted Petty. “I knew Teddy had known Paul for years, so I asked, ‘What’s the deal with this guy? Can I trust him?’ Teddy said, ‘You can trust him, but Paul is a character. He is off the wall. But if he says he will stand by you, he will stand by you.’”
They get to this old, upstate New York resort, where the match is scheduled to take place in a ballroom. Tazz walks into the building with his fellow wrestlers and is approaching the ballroom when he hears screaming back and forth: “Fuck you.” “Yeah, well, fuck you.”
Tazz walks into the ballroom, and he sees Heyman and Angelo Savoldi going nose-to-nose in a screaming match. Sure enough, Heyman stood by Tazz. “He kept his word,” Tazz said. “They took care of me during the match. At the time, winning and losing was important, or so we all thought it was. So I won my match, they paid me the money, and I thought this guy Paul was a stand-up guy. He was done there, but we stayed in contact by phone.”
Heyman asked Tazz to come to ECW, where he debuted on October 1, 1993, against another well-known independent wrestler, Sabu.
“I want you to come in and wrestle this guy named Sabu,” Heyman told Tazz. “Have you ever heard of him?”
“Yeah, I met him a few months before at an independent show in Minneapolis.”
“Do you think you can have a good match with him?” Heyman asked.
“Sure, it will be a great match,” Tazz replied.
Tazz was just saying what Heyman wanted to hear. “I had no idea if it would be a good match,” Tazz said. “I was just trying to get work.”
Heyman told Tazz, who was doing his Tazmaniac gimmick, that he wanted to make Sabu and get him over with the ECW fans. He also told Tazz he had a lot of open dates ahead, and if this match went well, he could expect some more work.
This was how one of the legendary feuds in all of wrestling was born.
